Why Is the History Profession So Resistant to Change?

Robert B. Townsend is the author of History’s Babel and director of the Washington office of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. An earlier version of this essay was presented at a workshop on “What Is the Future of the History Ph.D.?” for Harvard University’s History Department.

Why does change comes so slowly to the
disciplines? Despite two decades of prophecies about an imminent
revolution in the adoption of new media, and recurring job crises for
humanities PhDs that call into question the behavior of the
discipline, there is relatively little change to show for it.

The answer lies in a fundamental
disconnect between the structural elements of the disciplines and the
kind of top-down leadership that is possible in a system of widely
dispersed interests and authorities. Taking the history discipline as
a case in point, recent efforts to open up to new technologies, new
methods of dissemination, and alternative employment opportunities
for PhDs all have numerous precedents.

Just to take two examples, in 1926 the
American Historical Association issued a report encouraging graduate
programs to teach their students to write for a wider audience
instead of for each other. And again in 2004, the AHA issued a report
that encouraged history programs to widen their thinking about the
potential career paths for their students.

But in both cases, they ran against
prevailing notions of best practices in the discipline. But more than
that, they were both multi-year studies that started in one
context—an effort to connect historians to the general public in
the early-’20s in the first case, the job crisis of the 1990s in
the second—but were released in a context where the discipline had
returned to a more comfortable status quo. In the case of the writing
report, the leaders who spearheaded the effort had moved on and were
drowned out by a rising enthusiasm for monographic research, while in
the more recent case the job market improved enough in the early
2000s that departments no longer felt pressure to reform.

These speak to the challenges for any
aspiring reformers. History seems to excel in the creation of spaces
for small subgroups (as indicated by the over 400 peer-reviewed
English-language journals in the field), but is quite powerful in
resisting larger systemic changes.

The changes that have occurred—the
shift toward double-blind peer review in the middle of the last
century, or the rise of quantitative and social history in the
1960s—tend to arrive from the perception that a particular mode or
method of research has been exhausted. That is why—viewed over the
past 130 years--there has been a strong tendency toward long
stretches of conservatism, followed by brief flurries of excitement
and innovation in the discipline.

Current efforts to promote a more
general enthusiasm for the digital humanities and expand training for
employment beyond the academy, are still occurring against a
background where a similar level of exhaustion has yet to set in.

Take the integration of new media: A
2010 survey of history faculty found that even though two thirds of
historians were actively using technology to support their work, less
than five percent were thinking about, and using technologies in ways
that could fundamentally alter the nature of their work.

Even though there is a tendency to
think this is a passing phase (one that will be solved, in the words
of one digital history proponent, “one funeral at a time”), that
same survey showed only modest differences between the age cohorts on
the creative integration of new media into their work. Even among the
under-45 cohort in 2010, barely 6 percent indicated they were using
technologies to do more than simplify and aid traditional research
and writing tasks.

While a sizeable majority in that
survey said their primary inhibition against online publishing flowed
from perceptions that it lacked scholarly recognition and prestige,
the problem seems more fundamental. A 2012 survey of AHA award
committee members found two-thirds were regularly reading e-books,
but when asked if they would accept e-books for review, less than 1
in 10 agreed. It turned out that there were a host of highly physical
and tactile reasons for this preference—they wanted to underline,
write marginalia, and ultimately have a copy on their shelves.

It now appears our challenges lie
deeper in the input side of the equation, as the history discipline
still attracts students precisely with an interest in the physical
book as a medium. While students with an interest in new media have a
wide array of other disciplines to attract their attention—and
perhaps set them up for more lucrative careers—history attracts
those who fell in love with one or more books in the discipline, and
their aspirations and expectations are shaped by that view even
before they enter into a doctoral program.

The issue is not entirely hopeless. A
large portion of the respondents to the 2010 survey could at least
articulate reasons for wanting to publish materials online, but these
interests were narrowly functional—getting their work out more
quickly and reaching a wider audience. There was comparatively little
interest in making a substantive use of the medium. That, I am
afraid, reflects the persistence of structural problems that begin
even before today’s doctoral student chooses to pursue the PhD.

The structural impediments to digital
history are reflected in and reinforced by inertial forces in
doctoral training—again, not by a cabal that is overtly hostile to
change, but due instead to the complexity of a system that disperses
authority and self-interest, and locks in certain ways of doing
things.

The one thing that both programs and
students can be sure of is uncertainty—both about whether any given
student will finish, and if they do, where they will ultimately find
employment. On one side, history doctoral programs face high
attrition rates—of between 35 and 40%. On the other, the academic
job market also faces a high import rate—not just of students from
foreign universities (which account for about 7% of the faculty hired
into history departments each year) but also from other
history-related programs, which take another 15% of the jobs in
history departments.

All of that makes the ebbs and flows of
the market very difficult to track with any precision. And even when
the inputs are factored in, there are a host of variables in what
happens on the job market, both among the growing numbers of history
PhDs going into postdoctoral positions, falling into adjunct
positions for the short or long term, and those leaving for positions
outside of academia.

After ten years in the PhD program,
about 28 percent of those who started a decade earlier are in tenure
track positions, another 16% are in non-tenure track faculty
positions, and another 14% will have taken up employment outside the
professoriate.

Even though there has been a great deal
of talk of late about shortening the time to degree, it is worth
keeping in mind just how long this has been the norm in the
discipline. The average time to degree has been pretty solidly at
about 8 years since the 1930s, when the expectation of a book-length
dissertation fell fully into place. Until that changes, any
adjustment in time can only sacrifice preparation for the various job
markets—teaching as well as other non-faculty professions.

The extended time to degree also makes
it very difficult for a department to act flexibly in response to
fluctuations on the academic job market. Looking back over the past
four decades, there were very few years in which more jobs were
advertised than PhDs—which seems like reason enough to take a more
expansive approach in the preparation of doctoral students.

Going back to the earliest days of
history as an academic discipline, the number of PhDs conferred in
any given decade has risen and fallen, usually about five to ten
years after corresponding shifts in the job market. But the number of
programs has moved inexorably upward—and currently stands at about
162. While a handful of programs are discontinued in years close to
particularly poor academic job markets, a larger number of programs
invariably make the case that their departments would fill a distinct
niche—specific needs in a state, or a distinctive area of
specialization in Latin American history or digital history.

Local factors add pressure to persist
in the face of harsh job markets, and further upward pressure on
student admissions. Even as the number of jobs advertised was
plunging after 2007, incentives to return to higher education during
the recession helped push the number of applicants into PhD programs
upward. And responding to that demand, the average number of doctoral
students in these programs increased slightly.

As this reflects, the history PhD
exists within a system that is widely dispersed and subject to the
interests of departments that have their own specific
concerns—including maintaining a cadre of graduate student teaching
assistants and high-level courses for their faculty.

The choice is not quite as irrational
as it seems. There is a marked difference between the Harvards and
the lower ranked PhD programs in the academic job markets they each
serve. The smaller and lower ranked programs were serving closer-by
academic institutions (2-year and 4-year) that students from the
elite programs appeared to pass over. Top-tier programs such as
Harvard's, in comparison, served a national job market—often
consisting of other doctoral programs—and their students often
seemed to prefer a life outside of academia if they could not find an
academic job that met their level of expectations.

A distribution of employment of recent
history PhDs by the ranking of students’ doctoral programs found
the proportion of history PhDs going on to jobs outside the
professoriate was pretty consistent across the tiers of history
doctoral programs—as a bit less than a third of the students at
each quartile went on to nonacademic jobs. The real disparity was in
the mix of employing academic institutions for those in the
professoriate. Students receiving their PhDs from the elite
institutions were much more likely to wind up at institutions that
promote high research activity, while PhDs from other programs tended
to wind up in colleges and universities with greater teaching
orientations.

But of course the numbers look rather
different when you start to break them down by some of the
qualitative aspects of academic employment, such as the proportion on
and off the tenure track. Viewed from this angle, barely half of the
PhDs who make it through to the end were making it on to the tenure
track. One of the persistent questions has been why people would
choose to take and linger on in these terribly underpaid and
underappreciated positions. Many factors come into play, such as
geographic mobility and other life choices, but a significant factor
is in the expectations that are there from the beginning of graduate
training.

In a variety of surveys, over 70
percent of both doctoral programs and students reported academic
employment as the primary goal of their training. Objectively, the
numbers match the employment outcomes quite closely, even as they
suggest a problem for the 20-odd percent employed in adjunct
positions, and the quarter who take up employment outside the
professoriate.

Even with
counter-pressure of these various structural factors, none of these
issues are insurmountable. Full integration of digital history, for
instance, could thrive with admission policies that elevated students
interested in making a substantive use of new media, alongside
curricular changes that separate the assessment of research skills
and content knowledge from the forms in which it is assessed—allowing
a website to substitute for a research paper for instance. As for the
relationship between jobs and PhDs, unless the local incentives
change, the only other alternative is the development of training
programs that provide the flexibility to move forward with an array
of career opportunities.

Unfortunately, I do not yet see the
will or energy to substantially change the discipline’s ways at the
local level, which is why the future of the history PhD looks very
like its past.